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" Writing is a job: you must show up. "

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" I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid. "

" One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career. "

" I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right. "

" And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. "

Science Fiction

" I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse. "

" Vampires have always been hot. They are one of our most durable monsters. It's one of those stories that galvanizes us early and it's always going on. "

" The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That's my immortality. And I shouldn't try to mortgage theirs for my benefit. "

" That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write. "

" I like creating villains. "

" My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain. "

" One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die. "

" I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks. "

" If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it. "

" There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go. "

" My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one. "

" I was very much a child of the Cold War. "

" And I had always liked vampire stories because they are great material that can be refashioned in lots of ways. "

" Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times. "

" Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it. "

" If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move. "

" I'm still an English professor at Rice University here in Houston. They've been very generous in letting me on a very long leash to just work on 'The Passage' and its sequels. "

" I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day. "

" When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation. "

" One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality. "

" I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me. "

" One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent. "

" So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are. "

" My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run. "

" I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad. "

" I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer. "